Déjà Vu (3)
Q: Where did you serve during the war?
A: I was a helicopter pilot with the Gibro Second Combat Air Squadron. I flew an Mi-35.
Q: Do you remember what happened that day?
A: Of course. The weather that day, the comrades who rode with me, even the sight of the city center turned into a sea of fire—I’ll never forget any of it.
Q: What exactly was the mission assigned to you at the time?
A: We were being pushed back from the front. The damn war had reached the point where we’d have to hand over the oil fields—the very source of all this mess—straight to Solomon. In the end, higher command decided it was better to blow them to hell than let the enemy take them.
Q: So you attacked the oil facility.
A: More precisely, our job was to escort the strike team attacking the oil facility and buy them time. The plan was for our formation to draw out the ground forces while the strike unit set the oil fields ablaze with incendiaries.
Q: And you succeeded?
A: We did. I was shaking off surface-to-air missiles, carving up Solomon’s troops with rockets and the cannon, when I saw a huge pillar of fire rising from the oil fields in the distance.
Q: Then when did you encounter Solomon’s devil?
A: Right after we received word from the strike team that the operation had succeeded. I was turning my nose away to break out of the area when I spotted movement below. Infantry, though their gear was a little different from Solomon’s regular army. I’d been flying low to avoid surface-to-air missiles, so I could see them clearly.
Q: So it was them.
A: I didn’t know it then. Right after I saw the enemy go into a building, I laid down suppressive fire with the cannon because missiles and rockets were already coming down. I could see the rounds chewing holes in the exterior walls, but at some point I saw a human figure on the roof.
Q: Solomon’s devil?
A: A man. He didn’t have a helmet on—maybe he lost it while forcing his way up through my cannon fire and onto the roof. That’s why his white hair stood out so clearly. He was aiming something long and narrow at my helicopter, and in that frantic moment I thought it was a portable anti-air missile launcher. Naturally, I assumed it was a MANPADS or something like that.
Q: It wasn’t?
A: I saw it while I was dumping flares and wrenching the helicopter through evasive maneuvers. A rocket warhead came flying straight through the flares, almost as if they weren’t there at all. The RWR didn’t even go off before impact, and by the time I came to my senses, my helicopter was already buried in the ground.
Q: So that means...
A: He hit an evasively maneuvering helicopter with an unguided rocket. While cannon shells with enough force to tear a body apart were flying everywhere around him, he hit a helicopter that was jinking and weaving—with no guidance system at all.
Q: What happened after the crash?
A: Everyone who’d been on board with me was taken prisoner. They were released after the war, but they had a miserable time in the camp. From the ground troops’ point of view, attack helicopters are objects of fear and hatred. They fly low, hide, then suddenly pop up from beyond the terrain to pour fire on you before vanishing again. It’s enough to make anyone furious.
Q: Where do you think Solomon’s devil is now?
A: God only knows. But if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that I never want to face that man as an enemy on the battlefield again.
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The sudden appearance of a phrase that reeked of cult nonsense made the chat recoil in unison.
And astonishingly enough, it was something Artieas had actually used herself while promoting her organization.
Whether she claimed she had been chosen by God or could foresee the future, and all that other nonsense—if you gathered up every one of those novel little absurdities, you’d have more than enough to fill a fresh comedy compilation.
“Artieas had been steadily building her power even before the war broke out. She waited for the moment when Gibro’s invasion began in earnest, then struck the Solomon government forces from the rear—and succeeded, at that.”
Because so many of Solomon’s domestic forces had been deployed to the western front to hold back the advancing Gibro army, they were all the more helpless when the rebels launched their surprise attack from behind.
No matter how skilled the rebels’ armaments were, they still couldn’t compare to a nation’s regular army.
So it was only natural that everyone’s attention focused on the far more threatening armor and air power that Gibro had brought to bear.
“Thanks to the rebels stirring up chaos in the rear, Solomon’s internal situation deteriorated and a two-front war formed. In effect, you could say they were the ones who prolonged the war even further.”
“There are still rebel remnants left in Solomon. Artieas is alive too, hiding somewhere.”
We had launched several operations to capture Artieas, and more than once there had been moments that looked genuinely promising—but in the end, every attempt had failed.
The reason was that unexpected variables kept springing out of nowhere every single time.
“Still, she won’t be able to hold out much longer. Even Artieas won’t dare make a move now that her power has shrunk so drastically. I imagine Solomon’s intelligence service will catch her soon enough.”
As I shrugged and spoke casually to the camera, the viewers seemed to accept it and voiced their agreement.
Going too deep into the war backstory would get boring, so I decided to leave it there.
“So, does anyone have anything else they’re curious about?”
“Uh, um... ah...”
The moment I closed the notepad I’d been keeping open on my monitor and tried to steer the topic away, a flood of donations came pouring in.
Since the donation notices vanished too quickly, I decided to pull up the donation log on screen and read through them one by one before replying.
“Let’s see... Have you ever seen tanks in action? Of course I have.”
I laughed at the rapidly scrolling chat and answered, “Gibro fielded T-72M1s as their main tanks, while Solomon mainly used their domestically developed MK-V tanks. In terms of generation and performance, Solomon had the edge, but Gibro had the advantage in sheer numbers. In the end, Solomon’s armored forces overwhelmed Gibro’s.”
Those tanks were already separated by a pretty big gap in generation, and Solomon was bolstering theirs with American support on top of that, piling on new equipment left and right. There was no real contest.
That was the reason Gibro’s armor had been severely weakened from the latter half of the war onward.
“Have you ever seen a tank battle?”
“If you mean tank-on-tank combat, I remember seeing a Gibro tank get hit near the turret ring by a sabot round, detonate its ammo rack, and have the whole turret launched like a lid. The MK tanks were usually fitted with hard-kill systems, so there wasn’t much chance to operate near them, which is why I didn’t get to see many tank-versus-tank duels.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Leaving behind the viewer who thanked me because he liked my answer, I read the next question.
“VEX, you’re back again? The combat rations are already ordered online, so they should arrive soon. I think I’ll be able to do that content tomorrow.”
After the war ended and I came home, I’d been pretty shocked to realize how much domestic delivery services had improved.
I’d ordered through an app before the broadcast even started, and the estimated arrival date was tomorrow.
As I idly wondered whether it would be great if they’d come even when I asked them to deliver supplies on the battlefield, I moved on to the next question.
“Next is... a gaming stream? If by gaming stream you mean broadcasting yourself playing games, right?”
Leaving the chat’s nonstop reactions behind, I leaned back for a moment and thought it over.
Honestly, I’d been feeling that running only story time as my main content wasn’t enough.
No matter how much a broadcast where an actual veteran told war stories might spark curiosity, if all I ever did was talk about the same subject day after day, people would inevitably get bored.
You could tell just by looking at the recent stagnation in the rate of new viewers joining whenever I turned the stream on.
There simply wasn’t enough visual stimulation for people to keep finding it fun, so those who grew bored would naturally drift away.
In that sense, gaming was a very good option.
Whether I dove deeply into a single game or covered a wide range of titles, I could pull in fans of those games as viewers; and from the standpoint of my existing audience, a gaming stream—with flashy effects, direction, and the chance to watch the player react—would be far less dull than just staring at a single notepad while I rambled.
Varied, appealing content was a necessity if I wanted to survive here.
If I combined story time with gaming streams, it might just become the ace up my sleeve to break through this plateau.
“Sounds good. I was already thinking about trying a gaming stream, anyway.”
As soon as I responded positively, the chat heated up all at once.
After a brief moment of thought, I answered the viewer’s follow-up question.
“I don’t have any games prepared right now. Since I’ve got the stream on already, how about we browse the store together?”
You’re supposed to take the bull by the horns when the chance comes. Might as well do the same here.